This edition of the Australian Army Journal appears amidst a challenging time for the Australian Army. We continue to provide forces for dispersed and complex operations. Since September 1999 the Army has sustained a very high operational tempo. There is no sign of this abating.
Since the last edition of this Journal a number of our soldiers have paid the supreme sacrifice while fighting an implacable and dangerous foe in Afghanistan. At the other end of the operational spectrum, Army made a significant contribution to the relief effort in the wake of the bushfire emergency in Victoria in February. And of course we continue to provide Army Force elements and individuals for operations in the Solomon Islands, Timor Leste, Iraq, and various parts of Africa and the Middle East. Our soldiers continue to excel in each of these environments and to earn the respect of the nation and our allies.
The most significant development since the publication of the last edition of the Army Journal has been the release of the Defence White Paper—Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific Century: Force 2030. In his Order of the Day marking the release of the White Paper, the Chief of the Army expressed his satisfaction with its key provisions. Lieutenant General Gillespie noted that all the key projects, which he considered to have constituted Army’s ‘vital ground’ during the development of the White Paper, had been endorsed. In particular, he referred to those projects which were designed to empower our people, especially through networking. Key enablers of Army’s close combat capability, such as enhanced protection for individual soldiers as well as improved mobility, survivability and lethality, also received approval. Above all, the Chief confirmed that the White Paper would set the conditions under which the Hardened and Networked Army, the Enhanced Land Force, and the Adaptive Army could all be successfully implemented.
The environment created by such long-term grand strategic planning and a demanding current operational tempo requires considerable institutional agility and flexibility from the Army. In particular, the most reliable measure of our adaptability and responsiveness is the speed and fluency of our ability to identify and integrate lessons from operations.
It is to meet those twin challenges—winning the current fight and ensuring the effectiveness of longer term force generation—that the Chief of Army has devised the Adaptive Army. The implementation of Adaptive Army is proceeding apace. Forces Command (FORCOMD) will be stood up on 1 July this year. In his most recent directive about the Adaptive Army the Chief of Army has described its purpose in these words:
The success of Army in the conduct of contemporary (and future) operations, force generation and preparation will be largely determined by our capacity to learn lessons and then adapt based on those lessons. The Army must continually review and adapt to ensure that it remains fit for the changing environment. Part of this review is a periodic re-assessment of the appropriateness of structures, processes and priorities for now and the future. The implementation activities for Adaptive Army in 2009 will ensure Army is explicitly linking our different temporal adaptation cycles, or learning loops, with our organisations and structures.
In this way Adaptive Army will improve Army’s performance on current operations, while maintaining its axis of advance on the process of continuous modernisation. As the Chief of Army has warned in a number of his public addresses, Army cannot afford to allow the demands of persistent irregular conflict to erode our conventional warfighting skills and higher formation manoeuvre competencies. This is likely to be even more important in the wake of the expected White Paper emphasis on the residual risk of state-on-state conflict.
In our last edition we described the Adaptive Army as the most significant restructuring of the Australian Army since the Hassett reforms of 1973. Moreover, the Adaptive Army represents profound cultural change. Army, like many large, hierarchical institutions, is grappling with the challenges presented by the revolution in information technology. How can we best preserve our powerful collective ethos, while empowering individuals to exploit the proliferation of information available to them?
The Army Journal aspires to play its part in the process of learning and disseminating lessons. We continue to offer a forum for officers and soldiers to reflect on their experience on operations, and to debate issues of professional concern. We encourage every member of the Army, regular and reserve alike, to consider submitting articles for the Journal. However, we do request that members only submit original articles that have not been published in other publications. There have been unfortunate instances of late where we have published articles that have appeared in other journals or blogs without the appropriate acknowledgment. This has the capacity to undermine the reputation of the Journal and the Australian Army.
In our last edition we incorrectly identified the author of the article ‘Flying a Plane While in the Process of Building it: Reflections on Iraq’ as the same Major Michael Scott who had been awarded the 2007 Chauvel Essay Prize. This was an error. The author of that article was Major Michael Scott who graduated from the Royal Military College Duntroon to the Royal Australian Armoured Corps in 1997. He served in Iraq as a staff officer with Multi-National Security Command–Iraq between June and December 2007. The Major Michael Scott who was awarded the Chauvel Essay Prize is an officer of the Royal Australian Engineers. The Army Journal apologises to both Major Scotts for this misunderstanding.
We commend the contents of the Autumn 2009 edition to you. We continue to provide a forum for officers and soldiers to disseminate lessons from operations. In that regard we are grateful to the publishers of Australian Infantry Magazine for their permission to reprint the article of Major Mick Bassingthwaighte drawing lessons from his recent experience in Afghanistan.
In this edition we also publish a response from Bob Wurth to Peter Stanley’s article challenging the view that there was a Battle for Australia in the Second World War. The Journal expected that Peter Stanley’s article would spark controversy and invited responses. We publish Bob Wurth’s article in that spirit of fairness and balance. We consider this debate now closed.
Since the last edition the following soldiers of the Australian Army have been killed in action: Lieutenant Michael Fussell, Private Gregory Sher, Corporal Matthew Hopkins and Sergeant Brett Till. To their families and loved one we extend our sincere condolences and those of all their mates in the Australian Army.
